rolling Jericho calls The New Day trap queens 2016

Oh I hear you loud and clear - I only got through the G1 by skipping the undercards and all the Fale matches! It's only worth doing if it's fun, not a chore. Haven't been watching Raw or SD because that's exactly that, a chore (oh how I wish the Network had them a week later rather than a fucking month).

I'm still only a few eps into the first season of Lucha Underground, feel like I can go back whenever it takes my fancy tbh. I've got a Chikara sub too that I would have let lapse only they're doing a special event before SummerSlam so that's next weekend sorted.

Just watched Omega/Naito. I'd never seen a match from either man, but I've been hearing great things about both and I already thinking Kenny Omega is the coolest-looking guy in wrestling, so with that plus the hype I was pretty excited. The match certainly lived up to it.

[Quasi-spoilers ahead, but I won't give away the result]

For better and for worse, it was absolutely insane. The things these guys kicked out of in this match were just criminal. You had a power bomb through an announce table, over-the-guardrail dive, dragon suplex on the apron, and dragon suplex in the ring, all in one sequence, as a mid-match nearfall. At times it felt like they were fighting the last pro wrestling match in world history.

And yet the whole thing was built around a time-honored wrestling trope, with Omega hurting his left knee early and struggling with it for the duration. Omega sold it consistently and beautifully, too. So the match was 2016 state-of-the-art overkill and a purist's delight at the same time.

Not to mention that it was worked like a double-turn, which Omega teased following through with in the post-match promo before turning on the crowd again. That was a nice touch.

yeah i've had to let more committed souls guide my selective approach to the g1*, but it's been worth it. only styles / nakamura and zayn / nakamura are competing with ishii / okada, tanahashi / okada, and omega / naito in moty stakes imo.

*and not seen any super j-cup! unbelievable they have both on at the same time**

**okay looking at the schedule i guess it's only been the fairly insubstantial but presumably still quite fun first round so far

omega sells like no one else, i loved him hurting himself on the german suplex counter

Yes! That was so good!

Just watched Omega/Naito. I'd never seen a match from either man, but I've been hearing great things about both and I already thinking Kenny Omega is the coolest-looking guy in wrestling, so with that plus the hype I was pretty excited. The match certainly lived up to it.

The weird thing is, people have been so down on Omega during this tournament, probably 'cause they've worked themselves into a shoot fantasy booking a jump to WWE, and all they could see was him being conspicuously de-emphasised with the rise of Naito (plus Tanahashi's injury didn't help, and while his ladder match with Elgin was great, the IC belt is kinda doing nothing round his waist ATM). So a lot of people didn't see Omega/Naito coming, which adds to it in a way.

The character work in Omega vs Naito was top notch, which is one of the many things that put it over the top as an instant classic, even for people who haven't seen them before. That level of character work, psychology, selling, and build toward the finish is almost unheard of even in NJPW, outside of Tanahashi's matches and maybe also Ishii's.

gallagher/tozawa as good as any other match in the cwc imo, except for the crowd's awful tozawa mock-screaming

his finisher, the gentlest german, requires some suspension of disbelief though

I make peace with it by assuming that the snap german is what really does the damage, and the deadlift german is just a bit of showing off.

ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh sure

has anyone been more disappointing here than noam dar? i know he's very young but the way people talk about him, i'm not sure what's missing here that usually isn't elsewhere. he's got a great look, good mannerisms, great hair most importantly, tremendous accent, wrestles kinda like shawn michaels, but he doesn't have the thing that makes him a compelling wrestling character. he doesn't have a hook, so none of that other stuff really matters. not to be mean to finn balor, but finn balor would be in the same situation if he didn't have the paint.

https://mobile.twitter.com/davidbix/status/765901381513408513?s=09

idk noam dar feels very incomplete but like it wouldn't take much for him to be awesome. still him vs lun was by fgar my least-looked-forward-to match in the 2nd rd.

jack gallagher did a reddit ama last night before the match, he mentions some of his fave world of sport matches ever. i've never watched WoS so i am gonna try to check them out later.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL74BCE992F5D4DB90

I did a little bit of a deep-dive into this stuff a few months ago, if you're in the right mood it can be excellent. Starting out I found you kind of have to shelve a lot of your preconceptions about what wrestling is usually like in order to deal with the weirdness. There's not really any storylines or feuds in any meaningful sense and the pacing and psychology are totally different to what I was used to. You can't go into it expecting logically-built 5* epics

BUT if you can get past the superficial oddness of it and start enjoying that aspect (which tbf is exactly the stuff that Jack Gallagher seems to have picked up and mastered) then it is rarely less than engaging and is often totally dope.

I think it's probably an easier sell to British viewers; a lot of the weirdness (from a wrestling perspective) is actually not that weird at all when placed in the context of certain 60s and 70s British comedies and sitcoms - the pratfalls, the hamminess, the facial expressions and so on. It's often a lot like watching a physical comedy routine.

Les Kellett in particular (who I mentioned wrt Gallagher upthread) is just the funniest, strangest little troglodyte you'll ever see and there's something of Ronnie Barker about his comic timing and the glee with which he bamboozles his opponents. I love it. Seeing the pokey old halls full of shawl-wrapped Mancunian grannies and old geezers in brown suits, all booing and hissing and killing themselves laughing. It's like the panto or the music hall.

in fact yeah, this was the account i was watching it all on:

http://www.youtube.com/user/tellumyort

should also say in the interests of balance that if the comedy stuff doesn't sound so appealing there is also a ton of really great technical wizardry type stuff to be enjoyed from Jim Breaks, Rollerball Rocco, early Dynamite Kid etc. - guys who were far more about the labyrinthine submissions and smooth-as-fuck chain wrestling. That seems to be more of Zack Sabre's lineage I guess

there were actually a couple of parts of the tozawa-gallagher fight where i laughed out loud... that fight was straight up silly for a lot. the part where jack applies some sort of leglock and keeps moving his body away from tozawa and they spin in little circles as jack keeps wagging his finger saying "no no no you can't get me", or that completely ridiculous self-hold that jack traps akira in (the little ball?!) (although that should ahve not lasted NEARLY as long as it did, but tozawa going AHH! AHHH! AHH! all the time in the hold was incredible)

Thanks for those YouTube links, I'll dig around when this weekend of wrestling is over!

so i haven't been keeping up with this thread i just wanted to say that i'd never actually heard ZSJ talk before and i had no idea he had that accent

he sounds like he comes from the richest, evillest part of england

it's a bummer that everyone who was big somewhere else is a default babyface in WWE because his actual speaking voice is more befitting bill regal's heel persona than bill regal's

also his chin looks like a sweaty buttcrack

― qualx, Saturday, August 13, 2016 10:27 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weird that it turns out he loves Corbyn

The Eva Marie avoiding wrestling storyline has gone a bit meta

there were actually a couple of parts of the tozawa-gallagher fight where i laughed out loud... that fight was straight up silly for a lot. the part where jack applies some sort of leglock and keeps moving his body away from tozawa and they spin in little circles as jack keeps wagging his finger saying "no no no you can't get me", or that completely ridiculous self-hold that jack traps akira in (the little ball?!) (although that should ahve not lasted NEARLY as long as it did, but tozawa going AHH! AHHH! AHH! all the time in the hold was incredible)

lol yeah if you're into that then i'd definitely recommend having a look at those youtubes. that kinda stuff is pure WoS. i guess a large part of the appreciation is understanding where WoS was coming from and what the guys were trying to achieve - it was Sunday afternooon Grandstand pre-footy-results family comedy schtick and the whole point was that a guy featured on TV would probably be coming to a local town hall near you. The TV show was a vehicle for promoting individual personalities, as opposed to promoting feuds. You've got to be able to relate to it on those terms without expecting Flair / Steamboat or whatever. the rounds system alone is enough to entirely fuck with your usual expectations of what a wrestling match is all about.

weird that it turns out he loves Corbyn

<3 Eva Marie, as i will always <3 all properly protected heel characters who try to get out of fighting their superior babyface opponents.

also how good is Naomi's new entrance? swear to god, a good song and a cool entrance is more than half the battle in modern wrestling. you just ask Finn Balor.

whatever else i may be thoroughly excited about in the world of wrestling this weekend, let it be stated right here and right now that the idea of a Finn Balor vs Seth Rollins Summerslam main-event utterly repulses me and I'm quite certain that it is gonna suck ass and that it's gonna suck approximately 20x more ass than it ordinarily would when every motherfucker proclaims it to be the best match of the year. Balor is much worse than Rollins but neither of these guys is even close to as good as they're made out to be

idk noam dar feels very incomplete but like it wouldn't take much for him to be awesome

yeah that's basically what i mean, but until he gets there all the good stuff just seems pointless

aust!n he!berg at uproxx said something very similar today

He’s still missing some pieces of the puzzle though, because I just don’t feel like he’s connecting with audiences yet. Is he a bigger deal in the U.K.? If he’s got some kind of character or gimmick over there, I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t know about it.

I'm loving the wily veteran Brian Kendrick character, I'm digging him more now than at any other point in his career.

The booking and presentation of the second round CWC matches have a bit predicable, i.e. the lesser known guy controls 80% of the match, gets to showcase all of his stuff, and gets put over strong in commentary, but eventually loses to the more well known guy. Tajiri-Gran Metalik was the exception, but Kendrick-Nese, Ibushi-Alexander, and Gallagher-Tozawa all went down like that.

this episode of cwc is the first episode of any wrestling i made my newish gf watch, im glad it was this one (a solid and fun romp) and not another (gargano/ciampa or cedric/ibushi due to how much hollerin' i woulda been doing). she thought gallagher was great, asked why noam dar kept doing that dumb pose, and could not decide if she liked kendrick or nese more for the whole match and also could not guess who would win (given how hard nese was going i figured he was on his way otu but i did not say as much)

its a shame they couldn't have gotten trevor lee for this, tho. he woulda been a much better "youngest guy in the tournament" than dar

forgot to mention how much I've been loving kendrick here. he's so good at being like the anime version of a burnout rockstar.

someone on w!th sp4ndex compared him to solid snake and i was just like O_O OMG ITS PERFECT

nxt nxt nxt

i just tried to cram the last 4 weeks in 90 minutes while also eating food i don't know what's going on and i still don't actually know what a hashtag glorious bomb is i just want to say bobby roode's song is my new favorite song

I was trying to watch Mo Farah, NXT, and the final (?) Tragically Hip concert all at the same time. I obviously missed some stuff but Bayley vs Asuka was great. The timing between Joe and Nak seemed really off, it wasn't the best night for either one I guess.

revival vs diy (is that what we're calling them?) was maybe the match of the night, and the whole undercard was really enjoyable (aries-jose + the post-finish).

ember moon looks like a gosh darn superstar

does anyone give a hoot about summerslam

i think i'm just out of hoots to give for wwe, sorry brand split

aj and cena was absolutely hootworthy, the rest i've mostly had drifting on by in the background

the best thing i can say about summerslam is that i went to my friends new house where he has a giant tv and legit wwe network and it LOOKED very good

and styles cena was a summerslam-caliber match

and i missed the beginning but watched realest-guys vs. fuckin'-a-right-buds and owens continued to be an absolute gift from heaven with his trash talk. him yelling "HIGH FIVE" as he tagged jericho was A+++++++++++

also who knew adult men had so much blood in their front-of-skull skin

I have the day off work so I'm gonna watch summerslam, nxt and ufc. Will update.

So far-

Enzo's homecoming promo was beautiful. Bada boom.

KO is such a wonderful nob.

Sasha Charlotte has started as a botchfest to the point where I wonder if Banks is ok. After all those missed suicide dives leading up to this, I wonder if Vince is getting cold feet.

Oh wait this match got awesome, a razors edge off the second rope into a 'rana to kinda call back to Bayley last year? Amazing!

I will try to find the couple g1 matches everyone hyped

Ok if you skip past Sasha being dropped on her head, this is essential viewing. Sasha's offense is vicious, I especially liked the Boston crab in the second turnbuckle.

Ok post match Sasha looks a mess. Multiple refs have run straight in to check on her. I guess she could just be selling; I really hope she is ok.

Balor thinks about two sweeting the club.

How is Flo Rida such a thing for WWE?

David Otunga is still employed? Wth is this commentary team, poor Mauro.

Miz rocking a diamond phantom of the opera mask!

this will be an all-night spoiler to you ahh, but summerslam was literally 4 hours of everyone's finishers getting kicked out of 9 times each

i thought they were done with that

and yeah otunga is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaawful

that whole team has zero chemistry together

Otunga just said he calls crews jacked and an acrobat, a jackrobat. Ffs just fire him right here.

This has been alright, miz is perfect foil for crews to lay it in and look tough.

Re: That spoiler, I might just have to skip balor-Rollins, it looks so schimdie.

So far, other than the natural selection, no finisher kick outs and that is only a secondary finisher. Actually the first hour has been really fun. Wish they could fit a meaningless sami-cesaro match in too

For all the talk about cena's big match experience, I looked up cena at summerslam and you had to get to 2010, the 7 on 7 nexus match for a win.

Cena needs a new finisher, I think hornswaggle can counter or kick out of the aa at this point.

Match is good so far.

I'm always so shocked when cena actually hits the leg drop from the top.

This match needs some punches to the face, its all a bit too much 'i do a move, you do a move'

As a say that Cena hits a sweet clothesline. This is good.

Oh ok a super aa still gets a kick out. I think he needs to climb on the titantron with him.

Sweet match though

H8 the Hogan loss walkout for cena. Noone else loses and gets a whole send off saying omg look at this champion*

*hey jbl btw he isn't a champ atm.

So far, this has been way better than the last wm or ss. Wth jon Stewart turning up I'm sure it'll all change though

19 ppvs per year, not including nxt? I just don't have it in me.

Went back to bed and woke up to testicle jokes and kofis awesome pose while doing a top rope dive.